All pages showing in search engines except index page!

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All pages showing in search engines except index page!

kads

10:08 pm on Dec 26, 2008 (gmt 0)

This is the 2nd time this has happened in the search engine, which I find ridiculous. Basically, all pages are indexed in the listings except the homepage.

Having a look at the "related search" feature to see why the index page has disappeared, i find that the page:

www.domain.com/?hop=0 has been index as the index page, which is an affiliate link.

The problem now is, how do I get this URL removed? Or get it re-directed to another URL?

Alternatively, I could just change the home page around, but there should be a way to remove a URL or re-direct from my own site.

Thanks in advance

canadafred

7:26 pm on Dec 27, 2008 (gmt 0)

Ah yes, the joys and haunts of dynamically generated pages. Works well when done right but can be cumbersome to troubleshoot when <things go wrong>.

[edited by: caveman at 11:20 pm (utc) on Dec. 28, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed offensive language per TOS [/edit]

g1smd

12:59 am on Jan 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

You could alter your script to add a meta robots noindex tag when that parameter appears in a URL request.

You could add a disallow to your robots.txt file for that parameter format.

You could add a 301 redirect to your .htaccess to redirect those requests. This would also preserve the incoming PageRank too.

Your choice - each with different advantages and disadvantages.

kads

3:55 pm on Jan 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

thanks. I have tried the no index and the robots.txt and the situation resolved itself within 24 hours! Thank you.

g1smd

7:45 pm on Jan 2, 2009 (gmt 0)

Err, that was use *one* of the methods, not multiple methods.

If you block with robots.txt Google may still show it as a URL-only entry in the SERPs.

Additionally, Google will never see the meta robots noindex tag because they are banned from accessing the URL because of the robots.txt disallow rule.

Only the robots.txt and the redirect stop the URL from being listed. Only the redirect passes PageRank over.

kads

7:53 pm on Jan 3, 2009 (gmt 0)

hi. There was no page rank for that particular URL anyway. The dodgy URL had just cropped up within the last 2 weeks and doesn;t have any links etc to it.

the situation is resolved.

b34nz

8:52 pm on Jan 7, 2009 (gmt 0)

This recently happened to me on a wordpress blog, it lasted about a week and things went back to normal.